Monday Mystery Backlist - BLITZ

I'm so appreciative to Corey at The Drowning Machine for providing today's Monday Mystery Backlist title. Today he's contributed BLITZ by crime fiction's great Ken Bruen.

Ken Bruen's Jack Taylor series may be his best known books, but my first reading of Bruen came via his Detective Sergeant Brant series. Brant is a one-of-a-kind cop who makes Dirty Harry look like a limp dishrag. The character of Brant is less that of a traditional protagonist than of a hub around which other characters (many recurring) revolve. Think Ed McBain's 87th precinct stories, and that's a deliberate comparison, because Brant is a big fan of those books. He is also thought to be the most vicious cop in London, but to leave it at that would be to underestimate Brant's cunning and political savvy. In Blitz, a particularly sadistic serial killer is grabbing tabloid headlines by killing cops all over London. The pressure to catch the killer is having all kinds of unpleasant side-effects on the Southeast London squad. And even if they find the killer, can they get the evidence to convict? For fans of the Jack Taylor series, if you want to step just a little farther out on the neo-noir ledge and look down, Sgt Brant is more than ready to lend a hand.

BLITZ was first published in the United States by St. Martin's Minotaur Books (ISBN: 9780312327262) in June of 2004. In the UK it was first published by The Do-Not-Press Ltd. (ISBN: 9781904316008) in 2002.

As a side note on this novel, the folks over in London are working on a movie version tentatively due out in 2010.